The present invention relates to telecommunication techniques and integrated circuit (IC) devices. More specifically, various embodiments of the present invention provide an optical communication system.
Over the last few decades, the use of communication networks has exploded. In the early days of the Internet, popular applications were limited to emails, bulletin board, and mostly informational and text-based web page surfing, and the amount of data transferred was relatively small. Today, the Internet and mobile applications demand a huge amount of bandwidth for transferring photo, video, music, and other multimedia files. For example, a social network like Facebook processes more than 500 TB of data daily. With such high demands on data storage and data transfer, existing data communication systems need to be improved to address these needs.
With advent of semiconductor technology, CMOS devices and processes are used to design communication systems implementing optical fiber links. As CMOS technology is scaled down to make circuits and systems run at higher speed and occupy smaller chip (die) area, the operating supply voltage is reduced for lower power consumption, thereby allowing communication device to efficiently carry high data speed. For example, it is advantageous to integrate externally modulated laser driver into CMOS dies.
There have been many types of communication systems and methods. Unfortunately, they have been inadequate. Therefore, improved communication systems and methods are desired.